NAME

newsctl - USENET network news control files

DESCRIPTION

News control files live in /var/lib/news. The major control files are
the sys file (controlling distribution of news, see newssys(5)) and the
active file (controlling local filing, see newsdb(5)). A number of
minor files are also present.
Mailname contains the Internet domain name of this news system. If
your news system doesn’t have an Internet domain name (e.g.
dept.university.edu or fredshouse.sf.ca.us), you might consider
obtaining one. Failing that, if your news system is registered in the
UUCP maps, you can use name.uucp where name is your system’s UUCP name.
If your site is not registered in the UUCP maps but you have UUCP
connections to other sites, please get registered! It is, strictly
speaking, not acceptable to give DUMBHOST.BITNET as a mailname; Bitnet
sites should obtain and use Internet domain names or be hidden behind
gateways. As a kludge to accommodate unregistered sites who are one
hop off registered ones, mailname’s contents may be of the form
‘‘a@b’’, indicating that mail addresses of the form ‘‘user%a@b’’ are
correct.
Mailpaths describes how to reach the moderators of various hierarchies
of news groups by mail (to submit postings to moderated groups). Each
line consists of two fields: a news group pattern (see newssys(5)) and
mail address, preferably in UUCP bang notation (site1!site2!user) to
avoid ambiguity. The first line whose group pattern matches the
newsgroup is used. An entry for ‘all’ near the end is a good idea, to
forward postings for any otherwise-unrecognised groups to some known
‘smart host’ (be sure to get the smart-host’s permission first). If
the user name of the mail address is ‘%s’, as is usual, the %s is
replaced with the name of the moderated group, except that all dots are
replaced with dashes (e.g. posting to comp.compilers with a mailpaths
entry of allsmarthost would generate a mail address of smarthost!comp-compilers). An unrelated feature of mailpaths is that an entry for the
group internet will be used to route mail replies (manual and
automatic) for sites whose mailers cannot deal directly with From:
addresses.
Organization (or organisation) contains the default value for the
Organization: header for postings originating locally. Only the first
line is significant.
Postdefltdist and postdefltgroup contain the default distribution and
group, respectively, for local postings.
Server contains the hostname (see hostname(1)) of the server in your
cluster (normally, the host that runs relaynews). If such a file
exists, certain aspects of processing will be redirected from clients
to the server using rsh(1).
Whoami contains the name of this news system, for news purposes. This
is the site name used in Path: headers and so must agree with the name
your news neighbours use in their sys files.

EXAMPLES

A mailname.
world.std.com
A mailpaths for a UUNET customer.
alluunet!%sinternetuunet!%s
A whoami.
world
A server.
world